SlipstreamJobs tracks this role from the company's public career site. Apply directly on the employer's site.
Salary: USD 30,000 - 110,000 / annual
Speechify is a text-to-speech platform used by over 50 million people to convert PDFs, books, Google Docs, news articles, and websites into audio. The company has ~200 employees globally in a fully distributed setting, with no physical office.
You will lead the Android Core Product team, which maintains the most-used text-to-speech app in the Google Play Store. This is a hands-on role where you remain a significant individual contributor while also driving team-level improvements in how the team works.
Key responsibilities include:
- Own major features end-to-end from decision through release, working closely with design
- Own, maintain, and improve reliability metrics for key features
- Provide code review and mentorship that helps engineers learn
- Unblock team members stuck on problems; notice when shared solutions should be standardized
- Keep shared code tested, clear, and consolidated to avoid duplication
- Lead process improvements: identify when the team's working approach needs to change
- Reduce manual work in the release process and shift verification left through automation
- Run planning focused on decisions rather than already-clear work
- Participate in cross-functional discussions with Product and Design, bringing engineering constraints early
- Handle critical issues and provide nightly builds for QA
- Develop early-career engineers by assigning learnable work and protecting time for growth
The role emphasizes that code you write will be the smaller half of your impact. You'll spend significant time on team coordination, process improvement, and unblocking others—work that doesn't happen on its own. The company values skepticism from engineers and often hands underlying problems to those who raise concerns.
Requirements:
- 5+ years of software engineering experience, including time leading a team or owning a major surface while staying hands-on
- Strong Kotlin expertise: Kotlin Coroutines, Kotlin Flow, Dagger 2, MVVM, Clean Architecture, Background Services, Music Player Service, Android animations, Jetpack Navigation, JUnit tests
- Experience shipping and maintaining background audio or other long-running background work
- Understanding of testing importance and approach, including what cannot be covered by tests
- Track record of introducing something to a team that stuck after you stopped pushing it, with honest assessment of the cost
- Comfort with the unpopular aspects of leadership: asking people to change how they work and managing resulting friction
- Ability to argue which changes need heavy review based on system behavior
- Track record of building tools the team actually used, not only things that made you faster
- Ability to describe how your team works with AI agents, not only personal experience
- Product design intuition, user empathy, and drive to push Android UI/UX beyond spec
- Self-drive to improve app and codebase beyond outlined spec
- Excellent communication skills
Bonus: Open source Android contributions, iOS/Web/NodeJS experience.
